Home > Gwinnett > Rick Badie / My Opinion > Archives > 2005 > December > 14
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Learn to eat to live, not other way around
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
She excuses herself, and comes back with a gray, two-piece pants suit.
Three years ago, it barely fit Martina Desgouttes. Now, the size-16 outfit doesn’t fit at all. If she were to put it on, she’d look silly. Like a clown.
Martina Desgouttes used to weigh 200 pounds. Now she’s down to 125 and wears a size 4.
The suit’s her souvenir. It’s also a reminder of an unhealthy lifestyle, a time when she overate and didn’t exercise. When she could barely walk up the stairs in her Duluth home. When her blood pressure boiled and her cholesterol skyrocketed. When nearly everything ached.
“As you can see, the pants had been fully extended,” she told me Wednesday as we sat at the kitchen table. “And trust me, the jacket was so tight I couldn’t button it. Unbelievable.”
It’s that time of the year again. Many of us will resolve to get fit in 2006. Gwinnett gyms will be bombarded with dozens of newbies waiting their turn on the StairMasters and free weights.
Old habits die hard. Stick-to-itiveness falls victim.
Desgouttes’s been there. In January 2003, she pledged to do whatever necessary to change her lifestyle. She made the promise, then put it off. “There are a lot of goodies left over after Christmas,” the 51-year-old Jamaican told me.
“Waiting until Jan. 11 to start would give me enough time to finish all the sweets and breads. I’m not that crazy about sweets, but I love bread, especially garlic bread with garlic butter.”
A month later, Desgouttes was chowing down on some curried chicken and rice. Suddenly, her throat tightened. She had difficulty breathing. Her brow dripped with sweat. Relatives wanted to call the paramedics, but Desgouttes talked them out of it.
She knew what was going on. She’d stopped taking a medication for acid reflux.
“That was my turning point,” she told me. “I prayed and said, ‘Lord, whatever I need to do, I will.’ It wasn’t just about losing the weight. It was about wanting to live.”
So Desgouttes adopted an organic diet. Out with the sugar. In with the cactus honey powder. She stopped eating poultry and steak. She started using soy products.
Today, she’s a new person. More energetic and happier. She exercises twice a week — water aerobics. She can walk up the stairs without huffing and puffing.
The about-face has led to a new profession for the former information technology expert. One purpose of her nonprofit, Miracle Production Ministries, Inc., is to raise health awareness. She’s written a book, “How I Ate My Way to Good Health,” that includes her story, recipes, and a journal to track progress.
And she wants your New Year’s resolution to last a lifetime, not just a few months.
“I’ve become an advocate, pretty much, for getting the word out to people to think about what they put in their systems,” Desgouttes said. “When it comes to food, we put almost anything in our bodies.”
On Jan. 28, Desgouttes is hosting a conference — You Have the Power — from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Metropolitan Club in Alpharetta. Healthy eating is the topic.
Desgouttes will talk about how changing her diet saved her life.
And may save yours.
Emulate Pryor: Ban the N-word
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
No more comments will be posted on this subject. Go “debate” it somewhere else, and I use the word debate lightly, given the junk some of you (Richard, Fedup) and a few others have resorted to posting.
Too bad. But when you start making attacks and becoming unglued, it’s time to shut the door.
I thought you all would be better than that, and most of you were, but obviously, some of you didn’t want to have a true discussion. You wanted to be nasty. Call names.
I can take nastiness. I took plenty of it in an e-mail from a reader in L.A. I can dish it out, too, but a public forum isn’t the place to do it. It serves no purpose, either.
I would like to say one thing though: Some of you should read columns in my archive. You’ll get a better picture of who I am, and my consistent thought processes as it relates to matters of color and race. (Richard, you know what I’m talking about. I sent you via e-mail my William Bennett columns.)
As for now, I, and this blog, are finished with discussion of the n-word. Bye.
The column that started it all:
The players gathered outside the bathhouse before every Friday night football game.
Almost every time they did, somebody would pull out an eight-track tape player and plop in Richard Pryor.
It always elicited laughter at Gaston High School in Gadsden, Ala. It took the boys’ minds off the game. They relaxed. Pryor’s comedy could do that to you.
“Nothing was said between us when the N-word was spoken,” said Tommy Woodsmall, a land surveyor for a Duluth firm. “Usually there was so much laughing going on, it didn’t seem to be a problem. I believe that, because it was Pryor doing the speaking, no one was going to be offended in our group. We knew what was coming.”
They knew. Just like me and my friends. After a late night stocking the local Piggly Wiggly, somebody would roll down the car windows and pop in a cassette. “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” was a favorite.
We laughed till we cried. Then laughed some more.
The N-word flew out of Pryor’s mouth. His comedic timing, rhythm and stage prowess allowed him to make the racial epithet poetic — almost. And it seemed so innocent.
Like Woodsmall and his teammates, my friends and I, blacks and whites, glossed it over. We’d get a little uneasy sometimes when we heard the word, but uneasiness quickly turned to knee-slapping laughter. We were too young, too small-town, too something, to comprehend Pryor’s self-inflicted hatred.
Nowadays, vulgar comedians, following in footsteps they can never fill, repeatedly use the word. It’s almost their entire act. Rap artists rhyme with it. It’s their standard repertoire.
It’s also flat-out wrong.
You can’t raise up and scream racism when a white person uses the word, then applaud and accept blacks when they do likewise. You can’t justify it. Stop trying.
Even Pryor, who died Saturday of a heart attack, eventually admitted he was wrong. It took a trip to Africa in 1979 for him to realize the error of his ways. He swore he would never use the N-word in his stand-up comedy routine again.
I knew that Woodsmall, a white guy, was a big Pryor fan. The topic came up one day over lunch at the Rexall Diner in Duluth. I contacted him Monday after learning of Pryor’s death.
“There are things he said that me and my brother say to each other to this day,” he told me via e-mail Monday. “Things like, ‘Ask Raymond,’ and ‘Gimme a dolla!’ “
But the Woodsmall family avoids some Pryorisms.
“I have three sons, and I truly believe that they have never used the N-word in their lives, and I am proud of that fact,” he told me.”If we as parents stand up and teach our children how degrading and misused this word is, the result might get Webster to actually delete it from the dictionary.
“I’d love to see it!”
Me too.
